Metabolic Reconstruction of Glutamate-Glutamine Cycling: A Flux Balance Approach

Cells, tissues, organs and organisms can be understood as a large number of interconnected networks of biochemical pathways, genes, transcripts and proteins which give rise to emergent and specific functions and behaviors in a complex biological system. The complexity exhibited by these systems imposes considerable challenges to understand how they behave and work. For instance, diseases or patho-physiological states are complex conditions that must be considered in a holistic approach because they involve intricate interactions between thousands of components such as genes, transcripts and proteins. In this context, diseases are considered as perturbed states of these networks which can be used to identify components (e.g. metabolites, enzymes, etc.) and interactions that are gained or lost, as well as the biochemical pathways involved. Therefore, discrimination of components and interactions that are not relevant or informative is important to embrace the complexity for understanding biological processes. Systems biology, Network medicine and the recent Systems neuroscience has been successfully applied to make this complexity comprehensible in the different fields of biology, physiology, medicine and neuroscience. To illustrate these approaches within the framework of the workshop “Latin-American School on glial cells in the diseased brain”, we reconstruct the well-known glutamate/glutamine cycle to understand how glutamate can be a neurotoxic agent through glutamate-induced excitotoxicity in neurons and astrocytes.